Liontamer Posted October 10, 2007 Share Posted October 10, 2007 Real & Remixer name: Reuben Kee email: reu@reubenkee.com website: www.reubenkee.com url of song: Name of game remixed: ff7 Song: Still more fighting & those who fight Composer notes: Objective of this project was to try to emulate the electric guitar as close to human sounding a possible. Though it doesn't have the flexibility and diversity a professional guitarist could provide, I tried to have it stay close to the melody line as much as possible while humanising it with vibrato. The vision behind this piece was a bunch of sexy kawaii girls fighting off many ugly bad guys and finally the boss, which ironically has a flip on the themes used; boss theme for normal baddies, normal fight theme for big boss fight. Generally its just a fun piece, hope you guys have fun listening to it - Reu Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
big giant circles Posted October 10, 2007 Share Posted October 10, 2007 Hmm. This is not the easiest vote, I'll state. There's some cool ideas, and decent energy climbing out from this mix. However, it's kind of a mess, too. The drums are way too loud, and the mix is really muddy. Needs some windex and elbow grease to wipe all that off and get it nice and shiny. The guitar sample didn't bother me at very first, but during the more intense "shredding" and also the higher up on the "neck" you went, it definitely became less convincing and more of a farce. Nice work on the vibrato and nothing wrong with the sequencing, but the sample itself just wasn't capable of maintaining the feigned realism. Also, and we talked about it briefly in IRC, the repetitiveness with little to no variation of the primary riff of the original until the last quarter or so of the track. I think were it not for the muddiness, invasively-loud drums, the poor sample quality of the guitar (and brass ensemble too, actually - i.e. places like 1:26 etc), and over-saturation of reverb and low-end, I could let that aspect of it slide, as the drums themselves are of themselves a decent riff (mixing aside) and there are other elements that were clearly good additions to the track. This isn't bad by any stretch, but it definitely needs a couple runs through the carwash before it's going to get a ribbon from me. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liontamer Posted October 10, 2007 Author Share Posted October 10, 2007 Hmm. This is not the easiest vote, I'll state. There's some cool ideas, and decent energy climbing out from this mix. However, it's kind of a mess, too. The drums are way too loud, and the mix is really muddy. Needs some windex and elbow grease to wipe all that off and get it nice and shiny. The guitar sample didn't bother me at very first, but during the more intense "shredding" and also the higher up on the "neck" you went, it definitely became less convincing and more of a farce. Nice work on the vibrato and nothing wrong with the sequencing, but the sample itself just wasn't capable of maintaining the feigned realism. Also, and we talked about it briefly in IRC, the repetitiveness with little to no variation of the primary riff of the original until the last quarter or so of the track. I think were it not for the muddiness, invasively-loud drums, the poor sample quality of the guitar (and brass ensemble too, actually - i.e. places like 1:26 etc), and over-saturation of reverb and low-end, I could let that aspect of it slide, as the drums themselves are of themselves a decent riff (mixing aside) and there are other elements that were clearly good additions to the track. This isn't bad by any stretch, but it definitely needs a couple runs through the carwash before it's going to get a ribbon from me. http://tzone.org/~llin/psf/packs2/FF7_psf.rar - 120 "Still More Fighting" & 110 "Fighting" Aside from the car wash analogy, BGC read my mind. I don't usually quote, even when I'm in agreement, but that's how well he encapsulated my thoughts when I fired this up yesterday evening. Unfortunate too, because the arrangement had some good ideas, but the follow-through in developing them to their full potential wasn't there. Definitely a significant amount of repetition. The boomier drums sounded like they were Plus those acoustic and electric samples are used poorly, leading to a disparity in instrumentation quality. :39's robotically sequenced stuff is cringe-worthy. Brass samples at 1:18, and most noticeably at 1:24 are really exposed. I say all this, Reuben, knowing that you're typically an excellent arranger, and I definitely respect your moving out of your comfort zone. Once you get more time in with these sounds and learn 'em up and down, the execution will have synnergy with the arragement. But how it sounds now, definitely a case of the arrangement having some faults and the poor instrumentation execution doing nothing to help out. WIP-level at this point, and it shows. Good luck working on this further if you choose to, Reu. Looking forward to your next submission! NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zircon Posted October 10, 2007 Share Posted October 10, 2007 Unfortunately I have to echo the criticisms I levied on the FF7 project forums. There are production issues w/ the mixing/mastering that BGC pointed out, and the sequencing is rough and mechanical particularly earlier on. The guitar melody clashes with the chords in the :26 section and the repeat of that section later on. I like the arrangement concept, but 1:50 through 3:13 is just a copy and paste of :13 through 1:36. I don't think this can be overlooked. The original material and battle theme variation is good later on but I wish that were incorporated earlier. Overall this needs more arrangement and production refinement. I really want to see this fleshed out! NO, RESUBMIT Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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